Cashless payment by chipcards have become common in many areas of daily life. Here a distinction is made between account-related and non-account-related cashless payments with chipcards. An account-related chipcard requires an account with the bank issuing the card. If the customer wishes to process a cashless payment with his chipcard, he usually inserts the chipcard in the dealer's card reader machine, a data link is created to the customer's bank, the bank checks the presence of a covered account by the chipcard holder and if the account contains adequate cover, authorizes payment to the dealer. The disadvantage of this account-related chipcard lies in the fact that the creation of an on-line connection to the customer's bank can take a very long time or because of overload on the bank system, no connection can be established at all. In this case the customer must pay with cash or other payment means. If the customer has another account-related chipcard from another card-issuing bank, he can repeat the same process with this chipcard.
An alternative to the account-related chipcard is the so-called money card. The money card contains a specific money amount in the form of bytes which are transferred to the dealer system when payment is made. The advantage of this money card is that the customer can pay directly the dealer without on-line connection to his bank. A disadvantage of the money card is however its currently low acceptance by customers and the resulting lack of infrastructure.
Prior art cashless payment applications commonly require special payment instructions which have to be installed on the customer chipcard. Therefore, portability of such applications is strongly restricted. Implementations of special payment instructions depends on the operating system of the chipcard with the consequence that each operating system requires its own special commandos for execution of a cashless payment.